


our little duckpond

by qwanderer



Series: brickverse [6]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Autism, F/M, Future Fic, autistic kate moreau
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 02:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6356098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You think he's a mockingbird, Peter," she said, "but he's not. He doesn't just make the sounds he hears. He's a duck. He's as much at home in the water with me as he is on the ground with you or in the clouds with June."</p>
            </blockquote>





	our little duckpond

**Author's Note:**

> this may or may not be mostly thinly disguised descriptions of my own experience of autism, but I think it holds up as a story anyway.

The second day of their vacation, Elizabeth took little Neal out to the beach by herself after breakfast, so that Peter could spend more time working through all the things that still stood between him and the Caffrey-Moreau family. 

"Don't you want to be there too?" Peter had asked her. 

"Hon," she told him, patting his knee under the breakfast table, "I came here to see that they're happy, and they are. I came here to have fun with them. If we have another meal together tonight, that would be great. But I don't need any more closure with them. Not the way you do." 

Peter frowned thoughtfully. "What do you see when you look at Kate? - Georgia?" 

"I don't need to see anything. The Neal we knew, he was in pain, and letting him know that moving on was an option was the right thing to do. But Vic? I look at his face, and... I know everything I need to know about his life here, about his _wife_. He _loves_ her, Peter. She's his family, and he's _happy_. Whatever else she is, isn't my business. And I don't actually think it's yours, either, but I know you, and I know that that's something you might have to figure out for yourself." 

"What kind of guy am I that I need to find that out for myself even though you're probably right, because you're usually right?" 

"The kind of guy you are is a brilliant investigator. A brilliant investigator who cares a lot about his friends and is stubborn enough to see even the toughest cases through to the very end. And I love you, and you shouldn't change any of that. You're wonderful just the way you are. But I'm going to spend my morning with my son on the beach, and later I'm going to celebrate with family and friends, and I'm not going to worry about any of this because two of the most brilliant investigators I know are on the case and between the two of them, they can work out anything." 

Peter sighed. That... didn't sound too bad, he supposed. 

* * *

Vic welcomed Peter into his home for the second day in a row. In the morning light, it was different stained glass decorations that lit up where the sun slanted through them. More greens, aquas and blues, giving the room a watery feel, despite the warm colors of the furnishings. 

Petra wasn't in evidence, but the door to her room was closed, and Peter wondered if she was avoiding him and the disruption he seemed to drag into the house with him. He hesitated, not sure whether to sit or to excuse himself, go back to the beach and his wife and the kid he knew how to deal with. 

He thought he heard a breath of laughter from Georgia. "Sit, Peter," she told him. "We know you have questions." 

He sat. "I do," he said. "I'm not sure if I have the right to ask them anymore." 

"I don't know what you mean by 'right'," she told him, "but we know who you are, Peter, and what you do, and if we didn't want you here, you wouldn't even know where this place is." 

"Peter," said Vic, sitting across from him and looking at him with those clear blue eyes. "It's okay." 

Those eyes could make you believe anything. 

Peter settled in. 

"I guess... all I really need to know is that my old friend is okay," he told Vic. "And it looks like you are, but...." 

"I'm not quite the same person you knew," Vic guessed with a crooked smile. "And you feel like you're missing something." 

"Yeah," said Peter, almost whispering. He let himself look at Vic with his investigator's eyes, this man who lived quietly and happily in semi-obscurity with his wife and daughter, this man who wore his friend's face. 

Or the man who had worn the mask that he had believed to be his friend. 

Neal Caffrey had been a real person. Had been his best friend. And if he was going to keep that friendship alive with this man, he needed to know what was different, not just what was the same. 

"Tell me about Vic Moreau," he asked. "Who are you without the anklet?" 

"Free." 

The smile Vic gave was not quite like the so-wide-it's-painful grins that Neal Caffrey had showed when he was supremely happy. It was a close neighbor, more contented, more peaceful. Relaxed, eyes nearly slitted. 

Every moment of Neal Caffrey's life had been tense, in some way. 

Peter remembered holding the empty anklet when he'd gone to retrieve it from the morgue, remembered missing his friend with an intenity that physically pained him, and yet still finding it in his heart to be happy that the man had finally been able to escape, find his way out of the constant tug-of-war between Peter and the law, Mozzie and his life of crime, and Kate and his dreams of a happy ending. 

And he'd thought of the painting Kate had left and he'd thought, just maybe, that Neal and Kate were together again, living their happy ending where the law and Peter Burke could never touch them again. 

Looking at Vic and Georgia now, sitting on their sofa, hands entangled, living a life he'd never been able to imagine for Neal and his lost love, Peter thought maybe he hadn't been too far wrong. Maybe knowing these people, being part of their lives, was out of his reach. 

It wasn't because they'd left this world. But they _had_ left Peter's world, the one where if you followed the rules and worked hard, that was the best way to get what you deserved. The one where the system worked. 

Peter's world felt small, for a moment. As if he was the one who lived in an idealistic dream, away from the reality of everyone else. It wasn't completely unfamiliar. But it didn't hurt as much, this time, as it had when he'd faced it before, when Kramer had closed in until Neal's best option was to run, when a bribe to the federal prosecutor was the only thing that had kept Peter out of prison and his wife and his best friend both told him he deserved to be free, no matter how badly the system had to be tampered with. 

That glimpse of how wide and complex the world could be might not have hit him the same way as it used to, but it was still frightening, bewildering, and it ached, in his heart. He _liked_ his world. He liked to think he worked for a system that did good, generally. 

"So you live outside all the boxes, now?" 

"You can't survive without boxes, Peter," Vic told him. "But picking which ones to be in, knowing you have options... that means everything." 

"Huh," said Peter. 

Vic sighed, looked down as he spoke further. "When Mozzie first saw the anklet he said 'they burned your wings.' That wasn't exactly right, because I can change my shape to fit whatever situation I find myself in, whatever box I get shoved in, always have. Sometimes it hurts, and it hurt to be the guy who could live in a two-mile radius and an FBI playbook. But it hurt less than being Danny Brooks, or being in prison. Those were smaller places, smaller lives." His fingers roamed across Georgia's hand in his as he spoke, rubbing the back with a thumb or curling the fingers around his own, and she seemed content to let him. It reminded Peter of how Neal's hands had always been busy, always up to something while he thought, tossing a rubber band ball or fiddling with his phone. But it also reminded him of the tape of Kate's last visit to Neal in prison, as he put his hand against the glass, the quite literal box he was in stopping him from reaching out to her. 

"I could live in the anklet," Vic continued. "But I couldn't hope for certain things. Traveling. Having a house. A family. Being my own master. And after I got out, I needed time to figure out what I wanted to hope for. Loosen up my muscles, spread out, find out what shape I'd become without those constraints. For three years I was someone else's employee, but they didn't own me, they didn't get to determine what I could and couldn't do outside of work. And that was a start, that was a better box than the anklet. But I'm my own boss now. And I like that feeling. Always have, but even more now that it's legitimate. I have my boxes. I'm a detective, a husband, a father. I know who I am, but more than that, I know who I want to be. And there's nobody standing in my way." 

Peter had just started to feel guilt pricking at him for missing all of this, for making Neal feel like he had no choice but to leave, but then Vic looked up, looked him in the eyes, and said, "But I don't think I could have learned how to be those things without you showing me how." 

The warmth of that look, of those words, it was enormous. It filled the room. 

Elizabeth was right. (Of course Elizabeth was right.) Neal Caffrey had been in pain all the time Peter had known him. But Vic Moreau? He glowed. Bright as the sun. 

Peter didn't need to be here, not to investigate this, them. Vic and Georgie. They were happy. They worked. He wasn't sure how, but they worked. 

Peter still hated not knowing how they worked. Still didn't understand the context they lived in. He only knew his own box. It had never seemed too small before Neal Caffrey. 

But it wasn't fair to take that out on these people. 

"What are you thinking, Peter?" Vic asked. 

"I don't want to push," Peter said. "The last thing I want to do is disturb what you have here. But there's so much I want to know. I don't understand... how the Neal and Kate I thought I knew got here." 

"You can ask," said Georgia. 

Peter frowned, thinking about whether it was really fair to ask. 

"The thing about living outside of your box, Peter," Vic said, "is that from out here, your questions are just questions. In the anklet, every conversation was right on the edge of interrogation. But this is our box. Our house. And in our house, if someone starts getting uncomfortable, everything stops." 

Peter looked at Georgia, tried to read what she thought about that. He couldn't read her, but she must have seen his glance, guessed its meaning, because she started talking again. 

"I know you need to investigate, to tie up all the loose ends. I don't understand, but I know. The way you know that fish need to breathe water. I don't need to know what happens in other people's lives or what things Vic tells me are lies. They are what they are and if I can do anything to help Vic or Petra or my friends, I trust them to let me know about it. You, you have to dig. You don't stop digging. And Vic trusts you, so I don't see any reason to hide anything from you. If you need to find your answers to feel comfortable, then ask me. If I want you to know, I'll tell you. If I don't, I won't. That's how it works." 

Peter nodded at her, having no choice but to take her word for it all. 

He still wanted to be gentle. He still wanted to learn how to ask without interrogating. He didn't want to ask, _how could you put Neal through everything he suffered when he was chasing you, when he was mourning your death?_ Whatever had happened, they'd put it all behind them when they started this life. 

But there were some things close to that, things he'd been curious about since the first hint that Kate was, somehow, alive. 

"How did you survive the explosion?" he asked, and watched Vic's hands tighten around Georgia's. 

Georgia took a breath, and her eyes flicked from place to place, as if searching for the pieces of the answer. 

"I had to make a plan," she said. "Because without a plan, I know I'm useless. Plan A was to run. Plan B was to find out who was really behind it all, and go from there. When I finally made contact, Adler was making noises about making sure we disappeared forever. I'm sure he thought I couldn't read between the lines. When we met, I couldn't. He wanted us both dead. So I gave him the gun to do it, but I rigged the trigger. Gave him the detonator for the plane, told him he could blow the plane once we were clear. I rigged a delay. One blasting cap on the lines to the black box would go off with the trigger and then I'd have two minutes to get out of range before the other blew the payload and the fuel. Anyone investigating would find the plane blew up when the detonator was pressed. The lack of remains would be explained by the burn temperature of jet fuel." 

Her voice was a monotone, but where before Peter would have read it as apathy, he now read it as Georgia very carefully keeping herself calm in the face of something that had the power to crush her. Like the measured taps of Petra's SOS. 

"I didn't think he'd press the button while Neal was still out on the tarmac, but he did. I had a second to decide whether to run towards Neal or the other way, to my getaway vehicle. But you were there. Neal was turned towards you. He wanted the life you were offering. I thought he'd have better chances of getting there if I went ahead and just faked my death, the way I'd intended to fake both of ours. Take myself and the people who were after me out of the equation as much as I could. I grabbed the pilot and I ran. Some days I wished I'd run the other way. But things turned out right in the end." 

"You did what you had to do," Vic reassured, thumb smoothing along hers. Fingers playing with her ring. "What we have now, it's so worth all of that." 

_Do you understand what you did to him that day,_ would be a harsh question, now. Peter knew at least that much. He gave them time, and their hands settled, and Vic looked up at him again. 

There was another thing he needed to know but didn't want to ask - _If this is the life both of you wanted, why crime? Whose idea was it to live the way you did?_ He remembered that they'd met on a job of Mozzie's - that's what the Adler con had been. 

"You said you lie differently," Peter finally settled on asking. "Was the lying thing before or after Neal?" 

"From a certain point of view," Georgia said, in the slow, contemplative way she had, "everything I've ever said before Neal was a lie. It's all a con, you know, talking to people. Trying to seem like one of them. Trying to make them more comfortable around me. Neal was the first person I met who really adapted himself to me, rather than the other way around." 

"We taught each other," Vic said. "And Moz taught both of us. We all had our strengths, on that team. Moz had knowledge and experience. I had the face, the perception, the adaptability to get into the world of just about anyone. But Kate? She's always been the master of creative equivocation." 

"Creative equivocation?" Peter repeated, frowning. 

Georgia reached for her daughter's toy bin that sat at the end of the couch, gently pushing aside art supplies and fidget-toys, bringing out a set of brightly painted wooden cubes with letters on the sides. A familiar set of blocks - they'd bought the same ones for little Neal, early on. 

"This is what human language looks like to me. Each truth is its own unit. Solid, square, totally itself. But like a block, it can be seen from many different angles. A block has six sides. And truths can be put together to form a structure that has a shape." She tilted her head, placing blocks on the coffee table to spell _lie_. "It's as easy to shape truth as it is to rearrange alphabet blocks to get them to spell out whatever message you wish." 

Peter nodded. "Saying two things, implying they're connected when they're not. I'm familiar. Neal did it all the time." 

Vic smiled. "I picked it up from her." 

Peter frowned. "No, that's _you._ That's _Neal Caffrey._ " 

Georgia looked at him with an expression he couldn't parse, eyes slightly narrowed, eyebrows almost concerned. "You think he's a mockingbird, Peter," she said, "but he's not. He doesn't just make the sounds he hears. He's a duck. He's as much at home in the water with me as he is on the ground with you or in the clouds with June." 

Peter frowned, lips pursed, and then he huffed a breath, with the air of giving up. "If that's true," he said ruefully, "I'm not a very good ornithologist, then, am I?" 

Georgia shrugged. "That's about where the metaphor breaks down. You know him when he walks, when he runs, when he flies. And when he does that, he's there, right with you, or you can watch him, and you can know him. But there's something about the water that you can't follow him into. It's murky, to you. You can't see under the surface." 

His eyes followed her. "You can say that again," he said. "But I want to learn. I don't know if I can, but I want to." 

"Of course you do," said Vic with a smile. "You're Peter Burke. And you always will be." 

"You don't think maybe that's the problem here?" Peter said, beginning to get frustrated. 

"I don't see a problem here," Vic replied. "Just an opportunity." 

"Uh huh," said Peter. "So you think you can teach this?" 

"I think I can start," Georgia said. "It's too much for less than a lifetime. I'm still learning, myself." 

"Please," said Peter, leaning forward slightly. "Teach me about fish." 

"I think maybe if anyone can really see boxes from the outside, it's us," said Georgia. "Even when we're living in them. It can be a little like being in two places at once. We see that the patterns that people live by aren't always logical. They're still useful, comfortable. We love illogical patterns. They're fun to mess with." 

"Like people assuming that when you say two things together, they're related?" Peter asked. 

"Like language as a whole," Georgia said. "Like words. Common phrases that have lost all meaning but people say them constantly anyway. Compared to some things, that example is a pretty logical pattern. But it's still a pattern that doesn't need to be adhered to, if you can see it from the outside." She tilted her head, looking at the blocks. "The blocks aren't the letters. The truths aren't the words. There are other tricks that can be played with the words themselves. Still without lying, the way you understand it. Lies taste different on your tongue. Some of us like the taste and some of us don't. I've always preferred the lies I can build out of truth. They don't taste as foul. But they're very useful." 

"Why lie at all?" Peter asked. 

Georgia snorted, then leaned her forehead against Vic's shoulder. Vic's lips were pressed together in an expression of suppressed humor. 

"Okay, clearly I don't get the joke," Peter said. 

"I think," said Vic, "that in her language, you just asked her, 'why speak at all?'" 

"That's _really_ not what I asked." 

Georgia began lining up the blocks again with her free hand. "Why string elements together to communicate a message that wasn't already obviously inherent in the universe?" she rephrased. The blocks spelled 'HELLO'. 

Peter frowned. 

"To speak the language of humans we have to build our own truths because the ones that we trade in inside ourselves and between each other are in a language that doesn't translate very well into your standards - 'hello' and 'goodbye' and 'I care about you', they're things we don't have words for. We have our truths and we can build with them. We can con people into thinking we're one of them." 

"And you're not?" Peter asked. 

"Vic says I'm a brick wall." 

Peter's head twitched in a sort of minute double-take. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?" 

"It's supposed to be a fact." She tapped one of the blocks. "I am what I am." 

"That's one of your facts?" Peter asked. "That you're not human. That you're... a wall?" 

Vic turned to Georgia, watching her face, loving what he saw. "It's written in the unwritten book, 'the art of Kate Moreau.'" 

"Which was more or less written by Neal Caffrey," Georgia said, her mouth forming a brief smile. 

"Translated, maybe." 

"You told me things about myself I'd never realized." 

"You just needed the right words." 

Georgia nodded, like she understood something better. She turned away from Vic fractionally. 

"That's one thing you have to realize from the beginning, Peter. Everyone's got their own internal dictionary. Words, phrases - they taste different to everyone. We can believe we're telling truth if we just redefine the words for ourselves." She turned an 'R' block sideways, and on one of the smooth wooden sides was scrawled a childish blue 'V.' 

Peter ran a thumb across the markered letter. "So words don't necessarily mean anything in particular to you?" 

"They don't to you either," she told him. "Only you can't tell, because you only ever see them one way at a time. But they change, over time, in your head. Maybe it takes less time for me. But words are what they are because we use them that way over and over again." She lowered her head, pausing to think. "The same is true for faces, but with me it's disguises, more than expressions." She smiled a little, speaking in Vic's direction. "You remember the Smedley con? I liked that face. It was a good lie." 

Something pinged at the back of Peter's brain. Something he'd heard years ago, during that long night of immunity in June's guest quarters. 

"The police uniform," Vic said, smiling. "You did look good in that. You looked fierce and confident and unstoppable. How many times did we end up doing that?" 

"Once with every courier service in the city," Kate said, her mouth curling at the corners. "Starting with the big ones who always handle their own security. I liked knowing my lines." 

_That's right,_ Peter realized. _The one where they scalped Mozzie._

"So did you believe you were a police officer?" Peter asked Georgia, still trying to figure the whole thing out. 

"No," she said, shaking her head, still smiling. "The uniform, the demeanor, they became part of me, but they didn't mean the same thing to me that they did to everyone else. Blue for laws. But I lived my life by different laws. My patterns, my systems, in my world they're a lot harder to get away with breaking than the laws of the United States." 

Peter remembered their daughter and he thought maybe he understood that perspective just a little. 

Georgia was still alien to him, still read a blank where his gut was concerned, but he was learning. 

He thought if he just spent long enough watching her that he'd figure it out, be able to read her. 

Maybe that's what Neal had seen in her all this time. A mystery, a puzzle, an obscure and beautiful dead language. A book that once you'd figured out the beginning you couldn't stop wanting to read. 

But Peter Burke didn't have the time to sit in the Caffrey-Moreau living room for years, figuring out this one big mystery he'd finally caught the leads of. He had a job, a life, in New York. 

One more little mystery would have to do. 

"All right," he said. "How'd you get the Cape Verde hat back?" 

"It was here when I moved down," Vic said, looking at Georgia. "I never actually asked. There were too many other things to say." 

Georgie smiled. "Mozzie must have brought it back. I found it in Laundry Day." 

"One of his safe houses is called 'Laundry Day'?" Peter asked. 

Vic laughed a little. "It was more of a stash - storage for clothing, disguises, a little cash. More of an on-the-way-to-a-safe-house kind of stop. It got burned along with Winters." 

They were good together. They were happy. They had a life they loved, practical, sustainable, outside of the world that Peter had always known. Peter's world had proven impractical, and Neal Caffrey's outlandish dreams had survived, despite Peter and others chipping away at it like that for years. 

"Vic," he said, "I'm sorry I tried to make you live in my box." 

"I'm not," Vic countered. "It was a good time in my life." 

"This is better," Peter guessed. 

"Yes, it is." 

"I don't want to mess any of this up for you. I really don't. I'm sorry about last night and Petra. I don't know your language, your customs... I'm going to keep messing up." 

"The system needed a stress test," Vic told him, eyes warm. "Things here can't always be perfectly smooth. But I suppose that's the test of us as a family. I am who I want to be. But every life, every life that's real, worth living, has its upsets. Comes with pain. I do know that, Peter. I'm not trying to escape everything by living here and I need you to understand that. I'm not even trying to escape _you._ Just the space you live in. Because you are family too, Peter." 

"Are you sure?" Peter asked. 

"Absolutely," his friend replied. "This isn't like the storms I've weathered before, the times I've gone under, nearly drowned. This is just life, the way it should be. We can handle a few ripples in our little duckpond." 


End file.
